Developer Camp/MES

Developers Camp-2 is being scheduled on 27 Feb at our college, a joint exercise by Swathanthra Malayalam Computing (SMC), Students Association of Information Technology (S@IT), MES-FSUG and Zyxware Technologies.
Workshop camps like these are usually more of *hands-on* in nature, addressing real-world problems. With SMC-Zyxware the problems have an added dimension as they attempt to solve problems which a community closest to our hearts would cherish to use - they being linked to our native language - malayalam.

Lets make history by being there - right in the midst of similar problems and use our collective will in solving them. For the third years, this should be a golden opportunity to work with such problems as their Final Year projects or as their mini projects. Some of the known giants in Swatantra Malayalam Computing are expected to be around !!

The goal of the camp was to introduce FOSS to students who wish to be active learners and developers in free software community.

Session1:10.00am-1.00pm

The session started with a self introduction of the participants and their association with free and open software communities. The first step was to familiarize bug tracking system of KDE, GNOME and other projects. Mr Baiju explained about the importance of good bug-reports in software development and Mr Sooraj shared his experiences on reporting a bug.The demonstrations were on
1) How to find/confirm a bug
2) Studying the bug tracking methods of the software
3) Searching for existing bug reports in bug tracker
4) Necessity of good comments for bug reports
5) Resolving an existing bug
6) Efficient bug reporting in systems which lack bug trackers.
As per the request of the participants , there was a demonstration of basic command line tools indent, diff and patch. The necessity of following programming conventions of each community was discussed. Study of different version controlling systems used by various communities ended with familiarizing basic git commands.The process was hindered by the proxies in the network

Session2 2.00pm-5.00pm

Originally, a hands-on session on using IRC was intended.But as we could login to IRC with webchat only on two systems due to proxies in the network, a demo of the same was done.Mr Baiju stressed on the importance of mailing lists, IRCs, Version management systems, editors,effective communication between developers etc for the efficient development of software systems. Mr Sooraj illustrated about wiki and various documentation techniques used by free software projects. This was followed by a doubt clearance session.This lead to elaborations on payment in free software companies,their economic model, Linux documentation HOW TOs ...